And it's just a guess, but I suspect that. ''unsteady liver-spotted hands'' or not, none of them have any desire to substitute sipping tea and nibbling ginger biscuits while cackling and awaiting death as a replacement for life I certainly hope not until they drop off the twig.

She was then bought by the unscrupulous Raleigh, a survivor of "coups and counter-coups, calorie plagues and starvation," who now "squats like a liver-spotted toad in his Ploenchit 'club,' smiling in self-satisfaction as he instructs newly arrived foreigners in the lost arts of pre-Contraction debauch."